Palliative and end of life care content within common pharmacy textbooks

This study compared the end-of-life care (EOLC) content in pharmacy-related textbooks to textbooks evaluated in a comparable 2003 study.

Six common pharmacy-related textbooks were reviewed for content relating to EOLC. Five of the textbooks were the newest editions of the same texts reviewed in a similar 2003 study, and one focused primarily on clinical ethics, a topic that was underrepresented in the previous study. The six texts were searched for a list of 33 keywords or phrases pertaining to EOLC. Entries containing any of these 33 keywords were assigned a domain and scored using a simple scoring system of one if minimally helpful content was present or two if helpful content was present. The total number of entries and their average scores were compared to the results of the previous study.

The average number of entries per textbook was 154, which represents an increase from the 110.1 average number of entries in the 2003 study. However, one of the textbooks had a total of 470 entries alone. Of a total number of 78 possible domains, 40 had either zero or one entries. The average ratings for each book ranged from 0.5 to 1.6, whereas they ranged from 0.9 to 1.6 in 2003. Four of six books in this study had average rating of less than 0.9.

Although certain texts have made strides to include more EOLC content, overall, EOLC content in pharmacy textbooks may still be improved.